Modern demand for miniaturization has driven the development of increasingly compact, reliable, and low-cost fiber-based components for use in a variety of applications in the medical, sensing, and telecom fields. The availability of these increasingly complex components is credited to glass processing technology that enables engineers to develop repeatable fabrication processes for optical fiber processing machines, such as optical fiber splicers.
These machines offer great flexibility, capable of controlling the position, motion, imaging, and heating of optical fibers, but their complexity often makes development lengthy and somewhat arcane. This is especially true of more advanced components, such as lensed fibers, tapered ball lenses and multi-tapered fibers, requiring long hours of development for engineers and specially trained operators for production.
For example, known machines utilize software which is dedicated to easing development of certain specified comment shapes. However, new, custom, or complex shapes for which specifically tailored software has not been developed are extremely difficult to develop. For example, the variables for each motor of the machine must be individually set, with times, directions, speeds, accelerations, etc. all set independent of one another. Depending on the scripting used, setting the above routine can range from time consuming to obstructively unintuitive. Further, feedback when testing a developed program is minimal, and if the desired shaping is not obtained, the user must guess as to which variables to adjust and how to adjust them.
Accordingly, improved systems and methods for shaping optical fibers are desired.